How can I communicate with a BLE device in Simulink?

I would like to communicate with a BLE (Bluetooth low energy) device in Simulink. However, I found no BLE blocks in the Simulink library. Is this supported?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

There is currently no Simulink block that can directly read from a BLE device using the host PC interface. An enhancement request to add BLE Read/Write blocks to Simulink has been submitted to our development team.

As a workaround, you can add a MATLAB Function Block in your model that leverages the ble() function from MATLAB, which has been available since R2019b:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2019b/matlab/ref/ble.html

The code inside the MATLAB Function Block would be along the lines of:

function y = fcn()    
    persistent b;    %automatically initialized to []
    persistent hr;   %automatically initialized to []

      %%extrinsic declarations
      coder.extrinsic('ble');
      coder.extrinsic('characteristic');
      coder.extrinsic('read');
      if(isempty(b))
          b = ble("UA E39 MODULE");
          hr = characteristic(b, "heart rate", "heart rate measurement");
      end

      %%initialize output
      y = zeros(...)
      %%read data from BLE device
      data = read(hr);
      %%post-process the data
      y = ...
  end

Note that the 'ble'-related functions do not support code generation and therefore need to be declared as extrinsic.